Perl Vs Python

Thomas Wouters thomas at xs4all.net
Sat Mar 8 09:51:16 EST 2003


On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 04:00:45PM +0800, Isaac To wrote:

> I'd rather say that Python is developed much later than Perl, so it learns
> from all the ugliness of Perl. =)

Python wasn't developed 'much later than Perl'. I don't recall the exact
first release of Python, but Python *design* dates from the 1986-1990 era,
and hasn't changed in any dramatic syntactic way since. Perl 1.0 was
released in 1987, and has evolved in a shocking number of more ways than
Python (e.g. Perl 4 -> 5 brought Objects, which are at the very core of
Python, and there were three major releases before that.) There is plenty of
cross-polination between Perl and Python (such as perl-style regexps in
Python, and objects in Perl) but you can't really say Python's clean design
is or was ever a reaction to Perl's attempt to create a 'natural language'
programming language.

Python has learned from many mistakes, of course, and of many successes too,
but all of older languages (ABC, C, Modula, Pascal, shell, and I won't guess
at howmany more.) The same holds for Perl, of course.

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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